Enlisting patients as active participants in their own healthcare can increase patient satisfaction and the quality of the healthcare experience while decreasing the cost of providing that care.
A number of healthcare organizations and other enterprises have used the Internet to provide basic information to patients allow the scheduling of appointments, and to provide interactive healthcare calculators and the like which allow patient-sourced data to be input and certain information to be returned. While these services allow more patient involvement in the healthcare process, the information provided by and to the patient is held separate from the centralized electronic medical record (EMR) that provides a cohesive repository of medical information for doctors and other healthcare providers.
This isolation of the patient from the EMR is done for good reason. Preventing patients from entering data into the EMR preserves the validity of the EMR data so that it may be relied upon by other healthcare professionals. Patients often unfamiliar with the data they are collecting are likely more prone to make significant mistakes in that data entry than a healthcare provider.
Further, the data in the EMR, intended for healthcare professionals, is often unintelligible by patients and some aspects of the data could be confusing or unnecessarily alarming to a layperson. The act of a healthcare professional entering medical information is often the juncture at which the data is reviewed or considered by the healthcare professional in detecting possible problems. Entry of data by patients eliminates this important juncture. Finally, issues of medical privacy make it desirable to limit to the extent possible, broad access to the electronic medical record. Medical privacy laws prohibit medical data from being made available to the parties not authorized by the patient and some medical data from being made available to the patient except in the presence of a qualified healthcare professional.
This need to separate the patient from the integrating features of the EMR limits the ability to which the patient may significantly contribute to his or her healthcare.